Writing History, Writing Trauma Chapter 5

Dominick La Capra
“Interview for Yad Vashem (June 9, 1998)”

I will start this with a note, that Yad Veshem, from the title of this chapter, is the official Israeli memorial to Jewish victims of the Holocaust. I read this chapter before looking up the name, so in hindsight it is important to consider the context and form of this chapter. It is an interview with a representative who at least some degree works for the Israeli government, and is presumably Israeli. This is the first chapter I have read of Writing History, Writing Trauma, however, it will be interesting to see if La Capra was particularly careful or intentional with his words given the context in which it occurred.

With that as an introduction, I will discuss the themes of “Interview for Yad Vashem.” Broken into subheaded sections, the chapter explores trauma theory as well as its applications to the Holocaust, and to a lesser degree to American slavery and genocide of native people.
The chapter begins with a discussion of two trauma mechanisms, classified by La Capra as “acting out” and “working through” trauma. Acting out refers loosely to Freud’s “compulsion to repeat,” or “transference.” La Capra defines transference as the tendency to become implicated in the problems one is involved with – either in treatment or simple communication.

This transference, La Capra writes, occurs in many types of human relationships. Its connection to the compulsion to repeat, from what I understand, occurs in the person implicated in a victim’s trauma’s repetition of that trauma upon herself. A preoccupation with another’s trauma, La Capra seems to posit, is a repetition of that trauma. The further tendency to dwell repeatedly upon this empathetic experience is evidence of a transference, even, of the compulsion to repeat. La Capra does not specifically state this point in his work, rather, this is my effort to understand his theory.

La Capra posits “working through,” on the other hand, as a process of coming to terms with trauma and moving beyond it. He emphasizes that this does not mean the simple abandoning of an event, and further, that even if a victim has “worked through” their problem, further work may be required.

It is important to note that there is “working through” and “acting out” should not be considered binarily opposed. Rather, La Capra asserts, they are “distinct.”

In what seems like a nod to Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, La Capra highlights “processes of working through that are not simply therapeutic for the individual but also have political and ethical implications” (152). From this context, he touches upon the idea of trauma in politics, specifically from the point of view of identity politics.

La Capra’s discussion of identity, again, ties into Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity by emphasizing the ways in which trauma are internalized into one’s identity, and further, into a greater cultural identity. Internalization of the Holocaust into the global Jewish identity can be problematic for a number of reasons, he writes.

To close this rather lengthy write-up, I want to touch on La Capra’s discussion of the “redemptive narrative,” or the contemporary narrative structure that follows the Bible: paradise, fall, history, and redemption. These narratives obviously do not have to be biblical in their connection, indeed, the same structure is assigned in elementary school creative writing assignments – you must have a beginning, a problem, a solution, and an ending.

Closing his chapter, La Capra calls for a narrative structure that moves beyond this form, writing that the redemptive narrative has as a shortcoming a tendency to deny trauma. Indeed, in the idea of a complete solution at the conclusion, this structure denies the repetitive and pervasive effects of trauma. A narrative structure that takes into account post-traumatic reactions, including the processes of acting out and working through, represent a further-reaching contemporary model.